What custom software development costs

Between $28,000 and $75,000 for the three business systems below. All three run in a web browser, start with a logo and brand colors and nothing else designed, and have nothing built behind them yet.

• 01

  The internal tool, $28,000 – $40,000. Sales reps price a job from your own rules, a sales manager signs off on big discounts, each proposal comes out as a PDF, old proposals are a search away, and won work goes into QuickBooks.

• 02

  The customer portal, $41,000 – $58,000. Customers sign in, see their account, download what you send them, upload what you ask for, and pay what they owe by card. Their account details come from QuickBooks, and your staff get a back office to look after accounts.

• 03

  The operations platform, $52,000 – $75,000. Work comes in, gets assigned and moves across a board that updates live. Four kinds of staff use it, managers get weekly reports and a back office, finished jobs produce their paperwork, and it all goes into QuickBooks.

The portal and the platform overlap at the edges, so a portal that runs long can cost what a platform that goes smoothly does. If you’re building an app your customers download from a store, the app cost page covers that instead.

Who uses it, more than what it does. On the operations platform, giving four kinds of staff their own screens and permissions is the largest single line at $12,500, and the back office where managers set it up comes next at $11,000. Each figure below is what comes off the middle of the range when that one thing is taken out and everything else stays.

• 01

  Four kinds of staff, each on their own screens, $12,500

• 02

  The back office where managers set up users and job stages, $11,000

• 03

  A job board that updates without anyone refreshing it, $3,500

• 04

  Weekly reports for managers, $3,000

• 05

  Sign-in, $2,500

• 06

  The QuickBooks connection, $2,000

• 07

  Looking up old jobs by customer, $1,500

• 08

  Paperwork as a PDF when a job closes, $1,500

One extra kind of user is cheap, $3,500 in the pricing tool, and a phone app shows the same. It’s the count that adds up: the platform has three beyond the first, and each one is priced again, $12,500 in all.

A board that updates live, as described

$52,000 – $75,000. It’s the priciest feature here, and the estimator flags it as one you may not need. A courier moving on a map is where you do.

A board that refreshes when somebody opens it

$49,000 – $71,000. If jobs move a few times an hour, nobody can tell.

$28,000 – $40,000 over 13–18 weeks for the pricing tool: sign-in, reps and their sales manager on separate screens, a search through old proposals, a PDF for each one and a connection to QuickBooks.

The case for building it is the pricing rules. If they’re your own and they win you work, a product built for everybody won’t have them. If they’re a markup on a price list, a product you can rent probably handles it.

The QuickBooks connection is $2,500 of it. In the platform it’s $2,000, because the more a build already has, the less each thing added to it costs. What a connection costs is set by the system on the other end, so an older system with nowhere safe to test costs more, whatever your side looks like.

$41,000 – $58,000 over 15–21 weeks for one where customers sign in, see their account, swap documents with you and pay by card, with their account details coming out of QuickBooks.

The biggest line is one no customer ever sees. Your staff need a back office to look after accounts and open what people uploaded, and at $12,000 it’s a second application with its own screens and permissions. Card payment is $4,000, before the processor’s fee on each charge. What a customer portal costs prices one with messages in it, piece by piece.

13–18 weeks for the internal tool, 15–21 weeks for the portal and 16–22 weeks for the operations platform, in calendar weeks from kickoff.

The schedule grows much more slowly than the price. The platform costs $29,500 more than the internal tool in the middle of its range and takes a few weeks longer. Some of the calendar doesn’t shrink at all, and the development process guide goes through which parts.